A software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio whose function is defined not by its underlying hardware, but instead by its software, such that its output signal is determined by software. SDRs are thus reconfigurable, within the limits of the actual underlying hardware capabilities, by loading new software as required by a user. In addition, use of SDR improves interoperability through the adoption of industry standards which allow various applications (referred to as “waveform applications”) to operate on any compliant SDR hardware.
The U.S. Department of Defense, through its Joint Tactical Networking Center (JTNC) (formerly the Joint Tactical Radio System), now requires that all radios delivered to the armed forces adhere to the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) Specification for SDR. Several versions of the SCA Specification have been developed. At the time of this writing the latest specification published by the JTNC is SCA 4.0.1 dated Oct. 1, 2012. All published versions of the SCA Specification, including SCA 4.0.1, SCA 4.0, SCA 2.2,2, and SCA 2.2, are available to the public from the JTNC website and are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties.
A SCA-based SDR includes a Core Framework (CF) implementation to deploy (install and create) waveform applications in a controlled and secured manner. At startup, the CF implementation reads information from a hierarchy of Extensible Markup Language (XML) configuration files, referred to as a Domain Profile, which may include tens of thousands of lines of XML syntax spread over hundreds of files. Parsing a Domain Profile may require substantial computing resources, including processing time and memory usage.